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California Draft Gore Poised to Put Gore's Name on BallotWed Sep 26, 3:56 PM ET To: POLITICAL EDITORS Contact: Roy Gayhart, +1-858-581-1024, roy@california4gore.org, or Patrick McGovern, +1-812-219-0180, LA@california4gore.org, or Chris Vallone, +1-415-336-0796, all for California Draft Gore SACRAMENTO, Calif., Sept. 26 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Organizers of California Draft Gore, a grassroots campaign to put Al Gore's name on the California presidential primary ballot, announced today that the campaign has volunteers located in or assigned to all of the state's 53 congressional districts. Originally convening on websites like algore.org, meetup.com, savethewhitehouse.com and draftgore.com, California Gore supporters quickly built the infrastructure necessary to...

WASHINGTON - The Chinese were consuming fermented beverages — possibly wine — as long as 9,000 years ago, according to scientists who used modern techniques to peer back through the mists of time.Early evidence of beer and wine had been traced to the ancient Middle East. But the new discovery indicates that the Chinese may have been making their drinks even earlier.“Fermented beverages are central to a lot of our religions, social relations, medicine, in many cultures around the world,” said Patrick E. McGovern of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. These drinks “have played key roles...

China was drinking wine 9,000 years ago By Roger Highfield, Science Editor (Filed: 07/12/2004) A mixed fermented wine of rice, honey and fruit was being drunk in northern China 9,000 years ago, more than a thousand years before the previously oldest known fermented drinks, brewed in the Middle East. In the past scientists relied on the stylistic similarities of early pottery and bronze vessels to argue for the existence of a prehistoric fermented beverage in China. Today's findings provide the first direct chemical evidence from ancient China for such beverages, which were of cultural, religious, and medical significance. Dr Patrick...

The history of drinking Uncorking the past Dec 20th 2001 Recreating old drinks provides an enjoyable form of time-travelling IT MAY be small—each molecule is less than a billionth of a metre long, and consists of a handful of atoms of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen—but ethyl alcohol makes an excellent time machine. People have enjoyed alcoholic drinks since prehistoric times, making drinking one of the few strands that runs throughout the history of western civilisation. Appreciating the art, music or literature of long-vanished cultures can require years of study; recreating their drinks, and comparing them to what we enjoy today, ...

Mummy Hair Reveals Drinking Habits By Rossella Lorenzi, Discovery News Sept. 23, 2004 Mummy hair has revealed the first direct evidence of alcohol consumption in ancient populations, according to new forensic research.The study, still in its preliminary stage, examined hair samples from spontaneously mummified remains discovered in one of the most arid regions of the world, the Atacama Desert of northern Chile and southern Peru. The research was presented at the 5th World Congress on Mummy Studies in Turin, Italy, this month. “ In modern human hair the levels would generally be in the ranges of social drinking, but we...

Ancients Rang In New Year with Dance, Beer By Jennifer Viegas, Discovery News Dec. 30, 2005 — Many ancient Egyptians marked the first month of the New Year by singing, dancing and drinking red beer until they passed out, according to archaeologists who have unearthed new evidence of a ritual known as the Festival of Drunkenness. During ongoing excavations at a temple precinct in Luxor that is dedicated to the goddess Mut, the archaeologists recently found a sandstone column drum dating to 1470-1460 B.C. with writing that mentions the festival. The discovery suggests how some Egyptians over 3,000 years ago...

Using the tools of paleogenetics, scientists have recently traced the evolutionary history of an enzyme that helps us metabolize ethanol, the principal type of alcohol found in adult beverages. Scientists believe early human ancestors evolved their ethanol-digesting ability about 10 million years ago to fortify their diet as they shifted from a tree-based lifestyle to a more ground-based lifestyle... To help narrow that range, researchers studied the genetic evolution of alcohol-metabolizing enzyme ADH4, which has been present in primates, in one form or another, for at least 70 million years. Using genetic sequences from 28 different mammals, including 17 primates,...

MARIEHAMN - Wine experts Wednesday popped the corks of two bottles of champagne recently salvaged from the bottom of the Baltic Sea, where they had lain in a sunken ship for nearly 200 years. On stage in front of some 100 journalists and wine enthusiasts gathered in the capital of Finland's island province of Aaland, they eased the fragile corks from the dark brown bottles — one from the house of Veuve-Clicquot and the other from the now extinct house of Juglar. Swedish and worldwide champagne expert Richard Julin tastes a 200-year-old champagne Read more: http://www.windsorstar.com/life/World+oldest+champagne+uncorked/3841588/story.html#ixzz15b2y19eI As the contents were...

What do you get when you combine water, American persimmons and hops and ferment it with yeast? A beer based on a 300-year-old recipe scribbled in a cookbook kept by Virginia's prominent Randolph family. Ardent Craft Ales in Richmond recently brewed "Jane's Percimon Beer" unearthed from the book in the Virginia Historical Society's collections from the 1700s that contains food, medicinal remedies and beer recipes. The formula for the Colonial-era concoction is one of thousands of alcoholic recipes in the society's collection that provide a glimpse into what Virginians and others were drinking in the 18th century and other points...

Patrick McGovern "The site is very rich archeologically, has been excavated for the last 50 years by the University of Pennsylvania Museum. It has a large palace area with rooms, some of which are thought to have been kitchens for making the food for the palace, with jars of barley and other goods. Also, it has a whole series of tombs in which the burial was done in a special wooden chamber beneath a very large mound. It's almost as if you cut it yesterday and put the structure together. It is the earliest intact human building made of...

The modern diners sitting before Sams were about to eat the first reconstruction of that feast—a celebration that had remained undiscovered for decades after archaeologist Rodney S. Young first excavated Midas' tomb in 1957. Ancient Roman, Greek, or even Maya banquets had been re-created previously, but generally from texts and ancient recipes. Not so with the Midas feast. "It's the first time that somebody tried to do it working just from the chemical evidence," says Patrick E. McGovern, the museum's molecular archaeologist who led the analyses. In other words, from the pan scrapings.

Archaeology is an inexact science, as Sir Arthur Evans, a flamboyant early practitioner, knew... an excavator can always promote an extravagant theory under the guise of interpreting the finds. As he started to unearth a prehistoric mound at Knossos in Crete at the turn of the 20th century, Evans put his imagination into high gear. He rebuilt parts of a 3,500-year-old palace in modernist style using cement and reconstructed fragmentary frescoes to suit his views on Bronze Age religion and politics. Evans boldly argued that the Minoans, as he called the early islanders, shunned warfare, conveniently forgetting about the ruined...

“Far too often, what passes for history is nothing more than rehashed, undocumented folklore and myth, and this is especially true with ‘cocktail history.’ Not so with this fine book, Mint Juleps with Teddy Roosevelt. It is well-researched and documented, while also immensely enjoyable to read.” —Philip Greene, vice president, co-founder, and legal counsel of the Museum of the American Cocktail and author of To Have and Have Another: A Hemingway Cocktail Companion “This charming and erudite book is full of surprises. I never dreamed that the presidents were such boozers! Pour yourself a toddy and ponder a vexing question:...

200 years ago today, one of history's most bizarre disasters befell London when a 15-foot wave of beer flooded an entire neighborhood and left eight people dead.The Horse Shoe Brewery on Tottenham Court Road in London boasted a massive 22-foot-tall vat that held some 160,000 gallons of dark porter. On October 17, 1814, one of the metal hoops meant to secure it snapped, and the wooden vat succumbed to the immense pressure of all that fermenting brew. The gushing beer smashed open the brewery's other vats, resulting in a raging sea of beer that burst forth from the building.Over one...

I was watching the ballgame today, complaining to my wife about the lame commercials, and this one came to mind. It's still the best.

GRAPEVINE, Texas— A member of the Stroh beer family plummeted to his death early Wednesday when a rope of sheets he had fashioned to climb down from a 10th-story hotel balcony failed to hold, police said.Charles Suddards Stroh, 43, of Addison died about 3:30 a.m. at Harris Methodist Fort Worth Hospital, the Tarrant County Medical Examiner's Office reported.Police said Stroh had been staying at the Embassy Suites Outdoor World in Grapevine since early July, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported in its online edition Wednesday. Bill Bretches, general manager for the hotel, declined to comment.Stroh was a member of the family...

A Russian beverage company said on Thursday that it was acquiring the Pabst Brewing Company, which makes the Pabst Blue Ribbon beer popular with barflies and hipsters alike and other brands like Colt 45 and Old Milwaukee. [snip] The buyer is Oasis Beverages, a Russian brewer and beverages distributor. Backing Oasis is TSG Consumer Partners, an American private equity firm focused on consumer goods, which will take a minority stake. “Pabst Blue Ribbon is the quintessential American brand – it represents individualism, egalitarianism and freedom of expression – all the things that make this country great,” Eugene Kashper, the chairman...

<p>"Archaeologists in Israel have discovered a massive compound dating back to the Byzantine era, which was used for “industrial-scale” production of wine and olive oil.</p> <p>The site at Ramat Bet Shemesh about 19 miles west of Jerusalem contains an oil press, wine press and colorful mosaics, according to the Israel Antiquities Authority.</p>

A 200-year-old stoneware seltzer bottle that was recently recovered from a shipwreck at the bottom of the Baltic Sea contains alcohol, according to the results of a preliminary analysis. Researchers discovered the well-preserved and sealed bottle in June, while exploring the so-called F53.31 shipwreck in Gdańsk Bay, close to the Polish coast. Preliminary laboratory tests have now shown the bottle contains a 14-percent alcohol distillate, which may be vodka or a type of gin called jenever, most likely diluted with water. The chemical composition of the alcohol corresponds to that of the original brand of "Selters" water that is engraved...

Egypt's minister of antiquities says Japanese archeologists have unearthed the tomb of an ancient beer brewer in the city of Luxor that is more than 3,000 years old. Mohammed Ibrahim says Friday the tomb dates back to the Ramesside period and belongs to the chief "maker of beer for gods of the dead" who was also the head of a warehouse. He added that the walls of the tomb's chambers contain "fabulous designs and colors, reflecting details of daily life ... along with their religious rituals." The head of the Japanese team, Jiro Kondo, says the tomb was discovered during...